Monday, November 30, 2009

From Spears to Aircraft

A Sophisticated Flying Machine: A series of incremental technological changes has brought this configuration into existence.

This post by GilDodgen on Uncommon Descent gives an indication of the central place that Irreducible Complexity (IC) has in the ID theoretical canon; everything in ID theory seems to be either an aspect of this principle or a detail. This is what GilDodgen says:

The more we learn the more it appears that almost everything of any significance in living systems is irreducibly complex. Multiple systems must almost always be simultaneously modified to proceed to the next island of function. Every software engineer knows this, and living things are fundamentally based on software.

Evolution in the fossil record is consistently characterized by major discontinuities — as my thesis about IC being a virtually universal rule at all levels, from the cell to human cognition and language, would suggest — and the discontinuity between humans and all other living things is the most profound of all. Morphological similarities are utterly swamped by the profound differences exhibited by human language, math, art, engineering, ethics, and much more.

GilDodgen then goes on to suggest that the vast differences between human beings and other primates are evidence of the discontinuity imposed by IC.

In biological terms the crucial concept is structural stability; that is the ability to self perpetuate. But this is only possible if the components of a biological structure serve to promote self perpetuation and they can only do this if they work; that is if they function correctly.

Crucially for ID, GilDodgen assumes that functionality only comes in absolutely isolated islands; that is any change of a structure that goes beyond a certain small threshold entails a loss of functionality and thus a non-viable unstable structure. Thus if IC is true then there are no incremental entry points in or out of a stable structure. Thus IC structures (by definition) have no stable precursor structures incrementally separated from them. Ergo, evolution cannot happen.

The inverse of the notion of IC is Reducible Complexity (RC); RC requires that the domains of functionality/stability are so connected that there exist ways of incrementally modifying a structure and yet a stable structure being the result. The RC conjecture is that there is class of functional/stable structures that form a fully connected set and that a broad range of structural complexity is found in this set; if such exists then a barrier to evolution is lifted.

Of great significance to ID theory is this quote from GilDodgen: “Multiple systems must almost always be simultaneously modified to proceed to the next island of function”. That simultaneous modification is the only way to reach the next island of stability is, in the mind of the ID theorist, sufficient evidence of the complete isolation of islands of stability in a huge sea of non-viability; for to jump the gap between islands of functionality using random changes would require the simultaneous adjustment of several features in just the right way. The probability of these changes coming together is utterly negligible and thus a barrier of improbability isolates the islands of stability. The only thing that we know capable of jumping the space between the islands is intelligence.

Currently I have several issues with the concept of IC. The following points are really areas of research rather than killer arguments against IC.

1) If the only way to reach a near neighbor stable structure is by a very rare simultaneous change of features, then the IC case holds. However, if a route exists to a stable neighborhood structures via a “path” consisting of a series of incremental changes to single features ,each of which results in a stable structure, then we have a Reducibly Complex connected set of structures. However, these "single feature change" pathways are likely to be a relatively rare occurrence in the space of all possible changes, thus giving the impression that they don’t exist.

2) Human technological advance has only been possible because the limited quantum of human intelligence (call it i) can leap the gap between islands of functionality. But, and here is the important point, i is not large enough to leap the gap between stone age spears and GilDodgen’s aircraft in one leap. However, it is clear that the islands of functionality in technological configuration space are close enough so that given the quantum of human intelligence, i, the human mind can leap the gaps in functionality leading up to an sophisticated flying machine. It is conceivable that there are structures out there that can never be reached by the human mind because they are effectively irreducibly complex with respect to the quantum of human intelligence i. Nevertheless, it is clear that given human technology, large parts of technological configuration space are connected enough (i.e they reducible complexity with respect to i) to make technological evolution possible. It seems that IC and RC are not binary opposites but come in degrees. Fortunately for us technological configuration space is reducibly complex with respect to i. But, and this is the 64 billion dolllar question, is biological configuration space sufficiently connected with respect to the blind watch maker?

3) Human Intelligence itself appears to employ a kind of evolution; it makes a series of incremental adjustments to its concepts, concepts that are either selected or rejected; search, reject and select is the general evolutionary algorithm.

THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.